Netmatics Data Center Modeling tool is a simple but powerful tool to keep track of IT infrastructure equipment, such as racks, servers, switches etc. The user provides the information about the equipment and physical connections through an intuitive user interface. The tool creates a database model to keep track of the equipment status including details that are difficult to track in spreadsheets, e.g. … Read more

NorthBound Interface (NBI) that can consume applications’ intents for desired connectivity and traffic treatment is an elegant and powerful concept that can accelerate development of wide range of network applications on SDN. In this post, I will describe the idea and then fire-up a controller and a forwarding plane to get deeper insights into the potential of application intents. … Read more

This is a short and fast introduction to ONOS CLI and GUI. The project WIKI is a great and necessary resource but I wanted to develop a screen recording that could help launch a hands-on exploration of ONOS features. … Read more

Couple of weekends ago, I recorded a video of ONOS controller installation on Ubuntu server. I started with a new Ubuntu server and installed the software packages required to build ONOS. My goal was to enable a new user, unfamiliar with software tools, such as Maven and Karaf, to be able to install and run the controller. … Read more

I have been tinkering with Open Daylight (ODL) for the last few months and my plan was to write about how to work with various interfaces to enable simple use cases. I also had a small side project to keep tabs on an interesting SDN project, Open Networking Operating System (ONOS). My intention was to spend couple of hours on it so I watched ONOS Technical Deep Dive webinar … it blew me away!! … Read more

Network labs have always been effective tools to evaluate new technologies, gain practical insights in network behavior and learn. In this series of short videos I will walk through the steps of creating an SDN lab with Open Daylight controller and Mininet. … Read more

Lowering production and operations cost of a product or delivery cost of a service

Creating new sources of revenues by bringing a new product or service to market

Expected impact of SDN on cost of network infrastructure and operations has received well-deserved attention. Another frequently mentioned aspect of SDN is ‘network programmability’ for new or customized behavior of the network – a big high-level idea that will have many different manifestations. In this entry, I will dig a little deeper and focus on the potential of network programmability to control resources to create new services and revenue from the network itself.

Path computation tackles routing of flows across a network and allocates bandwidth resources to flows. Routing can improve (or degrade) network performance and in my previous post I used an example to illustrate effectiveness of routing to optimize network resource utilization and manage service performance by preventing uneven utilization links. While control mechanisms and protocols to distribute and configure paths have consistently matured overtime, path computation is still mostly done manually or with early stage shortest path algorithms. This is like having a sleek sports car with high-performance tires and a Ford Model-T with 20 hp engine – a great car in its time but inadequate today. The capability to compute paths is critical to optimize network performance and is a key enabler of routine activities that network operators undertake. Let’s look at characteristics of path computation capability and its use cases. … Read more

Throw-bandwidth-at-it is the most common methodology to fix all sorts of network issues with performance, service restoration or capacity for new services. As the name suggests, it relies on adding capacity to solve a wide range of problems associated with resources in the network. It is a simple strategy but also expensive in terms of initial capital investment, operational cost and increases network complexity making it less flexible to accommodate new business requirements. Let’s take a look at a different strategy based on network routing to reduce cost and complexity of optical and connection-oriented layer 2 technologies, e.g. MPLS and carrier Ethernet. … Read more

IPv6 is coming – traffic is a trickle but steadily increasing and smart wager is on demand, for relevant skills and technologies, to grow to drive IPv6 in the network. This entry is for those starting their IPv6 journey.